Tag Archive for 'background knowledge'

Willingham: Reading Is Not a Skill

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 28, 2009 in Curriculum, Education Practice, Educational Policy, Research and Reports and Teaching. 29 Comments

Dan Willingham reviews the draft voluntary national standards in reading and sees a problem:  ”Teachers and administrators are likely to read those 18 standards and to try to teach to them,” he notes.  “But reading comprehension is not a ’skill’ that can be taught directly.”

His latest blog post at the Washington Post’s education page observes that teachers tend to teach comprehension as a series of “reading strategies” that can be practiced and mastered. “Unfortunately it really doesn’t work that way,” he writes. “The mainspring of comprehension is prior knowledge—the stuff readers already know that enables them to create understanding as they read.”

Prior knowledge is vital to comprehension because writers omit information. For example, suppose you read “He just got a new puppy. His landlord is angry.” You easily understand the logical connection between those sentences because you know things about puppies (they aren’t housebroken), carpets (urine stains them) and landlords (they are protective of their property.)

Policymakers need to pay attention here because this is what those of us who complain about curriculum narrowing are complaining about: the natural impulse to focus on pure reading instruction in an attempt to boost reading scores is self-defeating.  When you see, as Dan does, how “bad readers” look like good readers when they have background knowledge to bring to bear on a topic, the reasonable goal of education becomes increasing the number of topics children know something about.  It may sound smart, even heroic, to focus like a laser on reading instruction, but ultimately the law of diminishing returns kicks in.  You build comprehension by building background knowledge in the reader–not by endless practice in determining the author’s purpose, finding the main idea and making inferences. 

The kids who score well on reading tests are ones who know a lot about the world—they have a lot of prior knowledge about a wide range of things–and so that whatever they are asked to read about on the test, they likely know something about it….Can’t you teach kids how to reason about texts, and thereby wring the meaning out of it even if they don’t have the right prior knowledge?  To some extent, but it doesn’t seem to help as much as you might expect. For one thing, this sort of reasoning is difficult mental work. For another, it’s slow, and so it breaks up the flow of the story you’re reading, and the fun of the story is lost.

And Dan has a line in his post that I wish could be on the wall of every classroom in the country:  “Hoping that students without relevant prior knowledge will reason their way through a story is a recipe for creating a student who doesn’t like reading.”

Ultimately the draft national standards do not serve us well by reinforcing the idea that reading a a skill.  It’s not, Willingham notes:

The mistaken idea that reading is a skill—learn to crack the code, practice comprehension strategies and you can read anything—may be the single biggest factor holding back reading achievement in the country. Students will not meet standards that way. The knowledge base problem must be solved.

A request–no a plea, really:  Forward Dan’s post to every teacher you know.  Tweet it.  Blog it. Put it on your Facebook page.  Do it now.   We’re not going to solve this problem until or unless we see this for what it is.  Here’s the link: Reading Is Not a Skill.  Pass the word.  And while you’re at it, here’s Dan’s video, Teaching Content Is Teaching Reading. 

 

Health Care and Background Knowledge

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 17, 2009 in Curriculum. 8 Comments

Understanding the health care debate requires basic literacy and math skills.  But Checker Finn writing at National Review Online, is struck by “the enormous amount of background knowledge” required to make sense of it.  “It’s almost a litmus test of cultural literacy,” he writes.  To illustrate his point, he looks at a few paragraphs of President Obama’s recent address to Congress last week in which the President took for granted that his audience was familiar with words and phrases like “comprehensive health care reform,” “Democrats and Republicans” “self-insurance,” “coverage,” and ”bankruptcy” among other terms.

What’s an “advanced democracy”? How many are there? What are some others? What’s the point of Obama’s comparison of the U.S. with other countries?  What are Medicare and Medicaid? Where did they come from? How do they work? Who is covered by them? What’s the federal deficit, and why are some people concerned about its size? What is the congressional legislative process, and why is it unusually complex in this instance?

“Perhaps you don’t need to know these sorts of things to succeed in college or the workplace (which seems to be the litmus test for today’s standards-writers and education reformers). But you really do need to know them to be a constructive participant in modern American life,” Finn concludes.  “Who is going to ensure that our schools teach them?”

Reading Strategies and Cargo Cult Science

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 16, 2009 in Core Knowledge, Curriculum, Educational Policy and Literacy. 6 Comments

The idea that it’s enough to simply ”find what works, adopt it, and spread it around,” notes scientist/blogger Allison over at Kitchen Table Math is an example of what physicist Richard Feynman called “Cargo Cult Science“:

In the South Seas there is a Cargo Cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things Cargo Cult Science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.

“Cargo Cult education seems to be all the rage in lots of communities,” Allison notes.  “Sure, districts could just start grabbing lessons from high performing schools but that won’t make the students suddenly read or write.  Unless they understand what’s underneath the ‘lessons of the high performing school’ then it won’t matter.”

I had never heard this Feyman anecdote but I may have to start calling our reliance on “reading strategies” instruction “Cargo Cult Reading.”  Its entire point  is to teach children “what good readers do” and the habits of mind that are reflexive to able readers.  It’s the exactly the same thing–you teach kids to mimic the behaviors that lead to comprehension–but without the background knowledge that actually makes it possible.  Indeed, a staple of strategy instruction is to teach children that good readers ”activate their prior knowledge to create mental images, ask questions, and make inferences.”  How exactly does that work in the absence of prior knowledge to activate? 

One of the things that more advantaged students typically bring to school is a lifetime of background knowledge (or “schema” as reading strategy enthusiasts prefer to call it) that makes comprehension possible.  Without it you’re sitting in the jungle waiting for the planes to land.

It’s Not Your Fault, But It Is Your Problem

Published by Robert Pondiscio on June 11, 2009 in Core Knowledge, Students and Teaching. 11 Comments

Mark Bauerlein has a piece on the Chronicle of Higher Ed’s Brainstorm blog that should give pause to those whose definition of achievement in public education starts and stops with reading and math scores. 

Bauerlein spins a fictional tale of a top Emory University law school student interviewing at one of the leading law firms in Atlanta.  Over lunch with the senior partners, the conversation turns toward the older gentlemen’s memories of the Cold War. “It’s not a test, and it’s not planned,” Bauerlein notes.  ”For them, the Cold War is simply one of those realities that any intelligent person is familiar with and has some opinions about.”  But the overachieving young man has nothing to add and is conspicuously out of his depth.   

The others have the tact to move on, but they note the deficiency. It doesn’t cost the young man the job, but the senior fellows make a judgment. This guy, they think, is sharp and hard-working, but get out of his training and he doesn’t bring much to the table. The deeper awareness that makes for a sober judgment and wider perspective is missing…This is the professional value of cultural literacy. It counts a lot more in professional spheres than academics and educators realize. The measure is informal, yes, but it makes a difference in how peers and superiors regard you.

Bauerlein’s piece reminded me of a conversation I had with an unusually bright student a few years ago.  She blew away every math and reading test she’d ever taken, but her walking around knowledge of even basic history, geography and current events was virtually nonexistent (Granted, she was a 5th grader, but she was under the impression that New Jersey was a country).  Discussing the gaps in her education, I told her, “This is not your fault, but it is your problem.”  Indeed, this young lady had done absolutely everything asked of her in school.  Her lack of breadth was not something she chose, but something we had allowed to happen to her.   If the gaps in her knowledge persist into adulthood, I knew, the world would certainly judge her skeptically, even harshly, for precisely the reasons Bauerlein describes–especially as a person of color from the South Bronx. 

Crucially, this was a kid with top scores on standardized tests–one of my school’s rare ”double 4s” in both math and reading.  By that measure–but only by that measure–a screaming success story of public education.  But what the data doesn’t show, and Baurlein’s piece reminds us, is that out in the real world there are very different metrics at work.  There’s too often far less to our current definition of success than meets the eye.

Teaching Content is Teaching Reading

Published by Robert Pondiscio on January 9, 2009 in Core Knowledge, Education Practice and Research and Reports. 8 Comments

A little over a year ago, I saw Dan Willingham give a talk at the Education Trust conference in Washington, DC titled “Teaching Content is Teaching Reading.” He demonstrated convincingly why background knowledge is essential to reading comprehension–and why broad, content-rich education is the best way to ensure kids can understand what they read.  Having been force-fed the idea that all kids needed is the ability to decode, vocabulary and “reading strategies” in order to comprehend, I thought – I still do — the phrase “teaching content is teaching reading” ought to be on the lips of every elementary educator in America.  

Dan has made an intriguing video on the main ideas of his presentation and posted it on YouTube. It’s terrific. 

<a href="http://youtube.com/watch?v=RiP-ijdxqEc">http://youtube.com/watch?v=RiP-ijdxqEc</a>

Great work, Dr. Willingham.  If you know an elementary school teacher, forward the link to Dan’s video.